Lost faces in Wajdi Mouawad’s Visage retrouvé

Abstract

Wajdi Mouawad’s works focus mainly on the characters’ identity quest. The writing’s hardness shows the cruelty of war, which is a leitmotiv in Mouawad’s works, due to the Lebanese civil war that the author has knew in his childhood. In his first novel, Visage retrouvé, published in 2002, Mouawad exorcises the memory of the past by his telling of Wahab’s story. This teenager found out, at his 14th birthday, that he couldn’t recognize his mother’s face anymore. This terrible loss will lead him to a dreamlike quest of the true face of his mother, which symbolizes the land of origins, the childhood and the lost tenderness. We have chosen to analyze this quest, in the light of the obsessive recurrence of images and words.